Report IDs top cybercrime trends

Cybercrime - including data breaches and security threats - will always be a threat to online businesses, but knowing where the threats are trending can help businesses better identify scams before their business is irreparably harmed. TrustWave has released their listing of the top cyber threat trends from 2015.

"Cybercriminals have been congregating and organizing for years, but 2015 showed a marked increase in the behavior we would normally associate with legitimate businesses," said Trustwave Chief Executive Officer and President Robert J. McCullen. "Based on the study of numerous security incidents, exploit kits and malvertising campaigns, our 2016 Trustwave Global Security Report shows businesses how and where these sophisticated criminal organizations are most likely to attack, and more importantly, how to defend their assets."

One of the weakest areas TrustWave found was in application security. Most (97%) applications they tested last year had at least one vulnerability, and 10% of the vulnerabilities were 'critical/high risk'.

"Compromises affecting corporate and internal networks increased to 40% in 2015, up from 18% in 2014. 38% of investigations were of e-commerce breaches, compared to 42% in 2014. 22% were of point-of-sale (POS) breaches. POS compromises decreased eighteen percentage points from 2014 to 2015, making up 40% of Trustwave investigations in 2014 and 33% in 2013," writes the company.

Meanwhile, their research shows criminals are continuing to focus on retail, with nearly one-quarter (23%) of investigations. As for ecommerce systems, most compromised retail systems that TrustWave investigated were using Magento's system. That doesn't mean that Magento is a flawed system, merely that cybercriminals are focusing on their system.

As for where cybercriminals are focused: North American leads (35% of investigations), followed by APAC (21% of investigations).